1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 178. James Taylor – Sweet Baby James (1970)

 

For the previous album, I noted the observation (not mine) that music was now catering to the ex-hippie crowd, and I think this is another such album. This is the growth of radio-friendly adult-oriented country-rock that dominates the early Seventies (and it’s no wonder that we’ll see heavy metal, and later punk, arise as answers to this).

Which is not to say that James Taylor isn’t pleasing to listen to. He has a distinctive yet comforting voice, like Van Morrison singing of simple pleasures and nostalgia. For a very long time I’d always misheard the title track as “Sweet Baby *Jane*” and vaguely assumed it was a love song. But, no, Taylor is singing to himself, both younger and contemporary, in a kind of cowboy lullaby, and having realized that I can’t tell if I think it touching or self-indulgent. It walks the fine line between, I think. There’s a therapy concept of being compassionate to your younger self, if as a child you have experienced traumas that you have internalized, so that you recognize that the child-self didn’t have the tools to deal with the trauma and so it’s okay for them to feel the way that they do. There’s a sense of that in this song. Since Taylor was undergoing treatment for addiction and depression, was essentially living penniless and had lost a good friend to suicide during the course of creating this album, the self-compassion element comes across very strongly. There’s more of Taylor wrestling with his issues in Fire and Rain as well.

There’s a religiosity running through the album too, from the gospel elements of Lo and Behold to various expressions of faith in Jesus as a solution to life’s problems, for example in Country Road. Taylor does a couple of blues tracks, and at first the lyrics of Steamroller (“I’m a churning urn of burning funk”) sound both uncharacteristic and ludicrous, and then you realise it’s supposed to be, a skewering of the ridiculousness of white bluesmen via hyperbole.

Despite the dark background to the album, it comes across as very pleasant listening, and with its references to Jesus and open roads, and the country/folk style, is very, very, American.